September 20, 1900] 



NA rURE 



515 



habitations in the North accordingly : that is, to tell us what 

 class of them were built by the Picts and what by the Little 

 People whom they may be supposed to have found in possession 

 of that part of our island. 



In Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland the fairies derive 

 their more usual appellations from a word sid or sith (genitive 

 side), which may perhaps be akin to the Latin sedes and have 

 meant a seat, settlement, or station ; but whatever its exact 

 meaning may have originally been, it came to be applied to the 

 hillocks or mounds within which the Little People made their 

 abodes. Thus, Aes Side as a name for the fairies may be 

 rendered by mound people or hill folk ; /^r side, "a fairy 

 man," by a mound man ; and ben side by a mound woman or 

 banshee. They were also called simply side, which would seem 

 to be an adjective closely allied with the simpler word sid. 



But to leave this question of their names, let me direct your 

 attention for a moment to one of the most famous kings of the 

 fairies of ancient Erin : he was called Mider of Bri Leith, said 

 to be a hill to the west of Ardagh, in the present county of 

 Longford. There he had his mound, to which he once carried 

 the queen of Eochaid Airem, monarch of Ireland. It was some 

 time before Eochaid could discover what had become of her, and 

 he ordered Dalan, his druid, to find it out. So the druid, when 

 he had been unsuccessful for a whole year, prepared four twigs 

 of yew and wrote on them in Ogam. Then it was revealed 

 to him through his keys of seership and through the Ogam 

 writing that the queen was in the sid oi Bri Leith, having been 

 taken thither by Mider. By this we are probably to 

 understand that the druid sent forth the Ogam twigs as 

 letters of inquiry to other druids in different parts of 

 the country; but in any case he was at last successful, 

 and his king hurried at the head of an army to Bri Leith, 

 where they began in earnest to demolish Mider's mound. At 

 this Mider was so frightened that he sent the queen forth to 

 her husband, who then departed, leaving the fairies to digest 

 their wrath ; for it is characteristic of them that they did not 

 fight, but bided their time for revenge, which in this case did 

 not come till long after Eochaid's day. Now, with regard to 

 the fairy king, one is not told, so far as I can call to mind, that 

 he was a dwarf, but the dwarfs were not far off; for we read of 

 an Irish satirist who is represented as notorious for his stingi- 

 ness ; and to emphasise the description of his inhospitable 

 habits he is said to have taken from Mider three of his dwarfs 

 and stationed them around his own house, in order that their 

 truculent looks and rude words might repel any of the men of 

 Erin who might come seeking hospitality or bring any incon- 

 venient request. The word used for dwarf in this story is corr, 

 which is usually the Irish for a crane or heron, but here, and in 

 some other instances, which I cannot now discuss, it seems to 

 have been identical with the Brythonic cor, "a dwarf." It is 

 remarkable, moreover, that the rdle assigned to the three Irish 

 corrs is much the same as that of the dwarf of Edeyrn son of 

 Nudd in the Welsh story of Geraint and Enid and Chretien de 

 Troies' Erec, which characterises him as fel et de pui'eire, 

 " treacherous and of an evil kind." 



By way of summarising these notes on the Mound Folk I 

 may say that I should regard them as isolated and wretched 

 remnants of a widely spread race possessing no political signifi- 

 cance whatever. But, with the inconsistency characteristic of 

 everything connected with the fairies, one has on the other hand 

 to admit that this strange people seems to have exercised on the 

 Celts — probably on other races as well — a sort of permanent 

 spell of mysteriousness and awe stretching to the verge of adora- 

 tion. In fact, Irish literature states that the pagan tribes of Erin 

 before the advent of St. Patrick used to worship the side or the 

 fairies. Lastly, the Celt's faculty of exaggeration, combined 

 with his incapacity to comprehend the weird and uncanny popu- 

 lation of the mounds and caves of his country, has enabled him, 

 in one way or another, to bequeath to the great literatures of 

 Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs and little people, a 

 whole world of wizardry, and a vast wealth of utopianism. If 

 you subtracted from English literature, for example, all that has 

 been contributed to its vast stores from this native source, you 

 would find that you left a wide and unwelcome void. 



But the question must present itself sooner or later, with 

 what race outside these islands we are to compare or identify 

 our mound-dwellers. I am not prepared to answer, and I am 

 disposed to ask our archaeologists what they think. In the 

 meantime, however, I may say that there are several consider- 

 tions which impel me to think of the Lapps of the North of 



NO. 1612, VOL. 62] 



Europe. But even supposing an identity of origin were to be 

 made out as between our ancient mound inhabiting race and the 

 Lapps, it would remain still doubtful whether we could expect 

 any linguistic help from Lapland. The Lapps now speak a 

 language belonging to the Ugro-Finnic family, but the Lapps 

 are not of the same race as the Finns ; so it is possible that the 

 Lapps have adopted a Finnish language, and that they did so 

 too late for their present language to help us with regard to any 

 of our linguistic difficulties. One of these lies in our topo- 

 graphy : take for instance only the names of our rivers and 

 brooks — there is probably no county in the kingdom that would 

 be too small to supply a dozen or two which would baflle the 

 cleverest Aryan etymologist you could invite to explain them ; 

 and why? Because they belong in all probability to a non- 

 Celtic, non-Aryan language of some race that had early posses- 

 sion of our islands. Nevertheless it is very desirable that we 

 should have full lists of such names, so as to see which of them 

 recur and where. It is a subject deserving the attention of this 

 Section of the British Association. 



We have now loitered long enough in the gloom of the Pecht's 

 house : let us leave the glamour of the fairies and see whether 

 any other race has had a fooling in these islands before the 

 coming of the Celts. In August 1891 Prof. Sayce and I spent 

 some fine days together in Kerry and other parts of the south- 

 west of Ireland, lie was then full of his visits to North Africa, 

 and he used to assure me that, if a number of Berbers from the 

 mountains had been transferred to a village in Kerry and clad as 

 Irishmen, he would not have be'en able to tell them by 

 their looks from native Irishmen such as we saw in the 

 course of our excursions. This seemed to me at the time 

 all the more remarkable, as his reference was to fairly 

 tall blue-eyed persons whose hair was rather brown than black. 

 Evidence to the same effect might now be cited in detail from 

 Prof. Haddon and his friends' researches among the population 

 of the Arran Islands in Galway Bay. Such is one side of the 

 question which I have in my mind : the other side consists in 

 the fact that the Celtic languages of to-day have been subjected 

 to some disturbing influence which has made their syntax unlike 

 that of the other Aryan languages. I have long been of opinion 

 that the racial interpretation of that fact must be, that the Celts 

 of our islands have assimilated another race using a language of 

 its own in which the syntactical peculiarities of Neo-Celtic had 

 their origin ; in fact that some such race clothed its idioms in 

 the vocabulary which it acquired from the Celts. The problem 

 then was to correlate those two facts. I am happy to say 

 this has now been undertaken from the language point of view 

 by Prof. J. Morris Jones, of the University College of North 

 Wales. The results have been made public in a book on The 

 Welsh People recently published by Mr. T. Fisher Unwin. The 

 paper is entitled " Pre-Celtic Syntax in Insular Celtic," and the 

 languages which have therein been compared with Celtic are 

 old Egyptian and certain dialects of Berber. It is all so recent 

 that we have as yet had no criticism, but the reasoning is so 

 sound and the arguments are of so cumulative a nature, that I 

 see no reason to anticipate that the professor's conclusions are in 

 any danger of being overthrown. 



At the close of his linguistic argument, Prof. Morris Jones 

 quotes a French authority to the efil'ect, that, when a Berber 

 king dies or is deposed, which seems to happen often enough, 

 it is not his son that is called to succeed him, but the 

 son of his sister, as appears to have been usual among certain 

 ancient peoples of this country ; but of this more anon. In 

 the next place my attention has been called by Prof. Sayce 

 to the fact that ancient Egyptian monuments represent the 

 Libyans of North Africa with their bodies tattooed, and that 

 even now some of the Touaregs and Kabyles do the same. 

 These indications help one to group the ancient peoples 

 of the British Isles to whose influence we are to ascribe the 

 non-Aryan features of Neo-Celtic. In the first place one cannot 

 avoid fixing on the Picts, who were so called because of their 

 habit of tattooing themselves. For as to that fact there seems 

 to be no room for doubt, and Mr. Nicholson justly lays stress on the 

 testimony of the Greek historian Herodian, who lived in the 

 time of Severus, and wrote about the latter's expedition against 

 the natives of North Britain a long time before the term Picti 

 appears in literature. For Herodian, after saying that they 

 went naked, writes about them to the following effect : "They 

 puncture their bodies with coloured designs and the figures of 

 animals of all kinds, and it is for this reason that they do not 

 wear clothes, lest one should not behold the designs on their 



